Ryan Alves | Through the Shattered Lens

The holidays may be mercifully over, but considering that I got my review copy of Ryan Alves and Ron Beek III’s new “split release” comic (co-published under the auspices of Alves’ AWE Comics and Beek’s Wtfawta), The Christmas Before/Santer, after the purportedly most wonderful time of the year had run its course, I was left with two options : review it now to keep the unseasonability of doing so to a minimum, or sit on it until next Christmas. I chose the former since the comic was still fresh in my mind and since it’s still available for purchase, which may not be the case in 11 months.

Before we delve too deeply into the particulars of the book itself, I should state that it seems the image of Santa Claus has fallen on rather hard times, which I suppose is to be expected in this cynical age, but we’re four decades on from films like Christmas Evil and Silent Night, Deadly Night, and the simple fact remains that there isn’t much of a “middle ground” for the character between jolly bringer of gifts and joy and psychotic serial killer apart from Bad Santa, which has become something of a latter-day holiday classic. You’d think somebody else would mine the fertile territory that is a debased but not altogether evil iteration of St. Nick, but for whatever reason, no one’s picked that ball up and run with it to any appreciable degree.

Not that I’m paying particularly close attention, mind you : Christmas and popular culture have merged into one inseparable commercialized entity at this point, and it’s one that I couldn’t frankly care less about — but that certainly didn’t preclude me from quite enjoying this comic, which is a testament in and of itself to the talents of the cartoonists who made it. I mean, if you can hold my interest with a Christmas-themed comic in the first place you’re doing something right, and if you can manage to do so in the days immediately following the end of a holiday season that I’m nothing but happy to see firmly in the rear view mirror, you’re doing something doubly right.

Not that I would expect anything less from these guys, both of whom have impressed me with their solo and collaborative efforts in the past, but I think turning their creative juices loose on a single connecting theme really draws attention to the different sensibilities each brings to the table, as well as the tonal similarities that make this pairing such a natural one. They’ve both, for instance, chosen to place their versions of St. Nick somewhere beneath Bad Santa but above the various “Santa slashers” on our makeshift “creepy Santa” scale, and both are masters at utilization of blacks, whites, and gray tones in their art (Alves’ cartooning leaning more toward abstraction and Beek’s more toward formal realism), but whereas Alves sets his wordless interpretive yarn in the dim reaches of prehistory, Beek’s story is very much contemporary, urban, and depressingly believable. Contrasts and convergences are the name of the game here, two sides of the same coin, so it’s entirely fitting that this is formatted as a true “flip book,” with each story given its own cover and both, quite literally, meeting in the middle.

The natural enough question following along from all this would be, of course, “so which story did you like better?,” but as much as this will no doubt sound like a cop-out, I found both to be successful for entirely different reasons. Alves’ The Christmas Before leaves one with more to think about, certainly, given its more mystical nature, but Beek’s Santer is open enough to interpretation as well and perhaps packs a bit more of a wallop in purely visceral terms, so — yeah, don’t force me to choose one or the other since I technically don’t have to anyway.

Besides, of utmost import here is the fact that they work really well together, something not every co-operative creative venture can claim — themed anthologies, in particular, having a rather spotty track record when it comes to maintaining an overall flow to them given that “all these comics are about a similar subject” is often an easy way to avoid the more challenging task of selecting material that either possesses an overall artistic cohesion or establishes a frisson of conceptual and aesthetic tension throughout, both of which of course offer their own rewards. Alves and Beek give us the best of both worlds here, presenting two discrete but linked comics stories that manage to play off each other and stand in stark contrast to one another. Don’t ask me how that works, just be glad that it does.

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The Christmas Before/Santer is available for $5.00 from the AWE Comics Storenvy site at https://www.storenvy.com/products/34444423-the-christmas-before-santer

Also, this review is “brought to you” by my Patreon site, where I serve up exclusive thrice-weekly rants and ramblings on the worlds of comics, films, television, literature, and politics for as little as a dollar a month. Subscribing is the best way to support my continuing work, so I’d be very appreciative if you’d take a moment to give it a look by directing your kind attention to https://www.patreon.com/fourcolorapocalypse

As we trudge on with our year-end review, we come next to a category that’s fairly easy to explain : TOP TEN COMICS SERIES refers to any ongoing or limited comic book series that saw more than one issue released in the past calendar year. As you’re about to see, anthologies — both solo and multi-creator — ruled the roost in 2021, a trend I’d be most happy to see continue. But we’ll worry about that in the future, for now here are my personal picks for best comics series in the present :

10. Bubblegum Maelstrom By Ryan Alves (Awe Comics) – Alves just plain tore it up in 2021, producing two issues of this now-concluded solo anthology title, the last of which was an 80-plus-page monster. Fitting, I suppose, given that monstrosity itself was a core concern of so many of the strips in this series. Bu turns grotesque and exquisite, sometimes both, Alves really went for the conceptual jugular with this comic, and I’m more than anxious to see what he does next.

9. Flop Sweat By Lance Ward (Birdcage Bottom) – Don’t you dare say memoir is dead until you’re read this. Ward’s autobio series is harrowing, heartfelt, sometimes even humorous — but never less than painfully honest. When the abyss that gazes back is your own life, and you can still make compelling art from that? You’ve got guts to match your skills. Never doubt Ward’s abundance of both.

8. Love And Rockets By Gilbert And Jaime Hernandez (Fantagraphics) – If you find a best-of list that this title isn’t on, you’ve found yourself one lazy-ass critic. Or a stupid one. Down a few spots from where I normally place it simple because, sorry to say, Beto’s current stuff isn’t registering with me to the degree it usually does, but hey — Jaime is continuing to produce some of the best comics of his career.

7. Vacuum Decay, Edited By Harry Nordlinger (Self-Published) – The most uncompromising underground horror anthology in decades continued to push the envelope with issue three — and with issue four, it just plain wiped its ass with it. To quote my own tweet back at me (speaking of lazy critics) : this is a comic that goes there. Whether you want to go with it or not, well — that’s your call. I know I’m down for the ride.

**6.Rust Belt Review, Edited By Sean Knickerbocker (Self-Published) –** Knickerbocker’s own strips about the tribulations and travails of life in “flyover country” set the tone for this diverse, oversized anthology centered on the big dreams and big problems of people with so-called “small” lives. Quintessential reading for everyone who understands that neither neoliberalism nor Trumpian neofascism (nor, for that matter, ‘tech bro” libertariansim) offers any solutions to those ground under by the wheels of what some still laughably term “progress.” *Real* stories about *real* people are the order of the day here.

**5. *Goiter Comics* By Josh Pettinger (Tinto Press/Kilgore Books) –** Two issues in one year from two publishers? Pettinger was one busy cartoonist in 2021, and the increased workload seems to be agreeing with him — from his strongest character studies to the opening salvo of an ***OMAC***-esque dystopian fable by way of the Amazon warehouse, this was the year this title well and truly came into its own and left any Clowes and Ware comparisons firmly in its rear view.

4. Acid Nun By Corinne Halbert (Self-Published) – Psychedelic cosmic interdimensional Satanic nunspolitation with a generous helping of BDSM fetishism not just on the side, but front and center? Sign me the fuck up for that any day, and when you factor in Halbert’s astonishing compositions and use of color what you’ve got is one of the most visually literate comics of the year as well as probably the most deliciously pervy. Plenty to turn your crank whether you’re gay, straight, somewhere in between, or completely undecided, but there’s something more going on here than erotic stimulation for its own sake (not that there’s anything wrong with that) — if you appreciate a cartoonist who’s clearly playing a “long game” of stimulating you libidinally as foreplay to stimulating you intellectually, you’ve come to the right place.

3 Future By Tommi Musturi (Self-Published) – A web that draws you in by continuing to expand outward, Musturi’s various (and variously-styled) narratives never cease to impress, even as they bob and weave between confounding and illuminating. Everything is building toward something here — a conceptual singularity, at least, and perhaps even a narrative one —but I’m enjoying the individual journeys far too much to be ready for a destination yet. It doesn’t get much more unique than this, folks — a series you already miss before it’s even over.

2. Reptile House, Edited By (I’m Assuming Here) Nick Bunch (Reptile House Comix) – Created and published by a de facto artistic collective out of Philly, this is exhibit B for my contention that locally-focused anthologies are the future of comics. A heady mix of long-form continuing narratives and hilariously visceral one-offs, 99% of the cartoonists appearing in these pages are folks that I’ve never heard of before, but their work — like this series itself — just gets stronger and stronger as it goes on. And they wrapped up an already amazingly strong year with a killer 3-D issue. This is grassroots comics-making the way you remember it — and the way you’ve never seen it before.

1. **Tinfoil Comix**, **Edited By Floyd Tangeman With Co-Edits On #4 By Austin English (Dead Crow/Domino Books) –** As for exhibit A for my contention about locally-based anthologies, this is it right here. Tangeman’s Bay Area anthology will, mark my words, go down as the most important signifier of not just where comics *are*, but where they’re *going*, since ***Kramers Ergot 4***. This series burned as quickly and brightly as one can imagine, and the mark it left is going to be felt for years to come. We’ll see if the new bi-coastal “successor” series Tangeman and English are cooking up can keep the creative momentum going, but if the job they did together on #4 is any indication, we’ve got *plenty* to be excited about.

Next up we’ll do the “grab-bag” category that is TOP TEN SPECIAL MENTIONS, but in the meantime please consider helping me crank out more of this kind of theoretically enjoyable content by subscribing to my Patreon, where I serve up exclusive thrice-weekly rants and ramblings on the worlds of comics, films, television, literature, and politics for as little as a dollar a month. Here’s a link : https://www.patreon.com/fourcolorapocalypse